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 Community Engagement in a Box: ITVS and the Evolution of Outreach By Karen Hirsch and Elizabeth Meyer 
In 1986, CPB funded the Public Television Outreach Alliance (PTOA), an organization dedicated to creating and promoting outreach opportunities. "In the beginning, it was a lot of pushing the river," said Roselle Kovitz, one of PTOA's first regional coordinators. "People at the stations didn't know what outreach was. They said, ‘We're not social service agencies. This is not what we should be doing.'" A few years later, ITVS began with the ambitious goal of creating public television content for underserved audiences and connecting those audiences with needed resources and information. In its 15-year history, ITVS has waged pivotal outreach campaigns that have directly impacted hundreds of thousands of viewers and helped define public media outreach. ITVS has accomplished this by keeping a sensitive finger on the pulse of the nation—listening to filmmakers as they identified crucial, untold stories and responding to the needs of communities whose issues had eluded the public eye. THE AUDIENCE CONNECTION Drawing on the community organizing expertise of staff, ITVS began developing direct relationships with PBS stations and helping them connect with local audiences around ITVS programs. "The most important piece of those early days," recalled ITVS's first outreach coordinator, Suzanne Stenson O'Brien, "was for the relationship to be mutually beneficial—to lead the stations to their underserved communities." ITVS continued to support programming for underserved audiences—but increasingly, the programming began to speak to larger and more diverse communities. As the content evolved, so did ITVS's approach to outreach, creating links between stations, national nonprofits, local community groups and underserved communities in new parts of the country. WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE, produced by Calvin Skaggs and David Van Taylor, tells the story of the recent rise of the religious right from the perspective of conservative Christians. The six-part series, which aired in 1996, garnered praise from across the political spectrum—from Pat Robertson to The Southern Voice, a gay publication based in Atlanta. The outreach campaign intentionally sought attention from the religious right and its traditional adversaries. In the process, it challenged the very definition of "underserved audiences" in ITVS's mandate.
Through the mid-90s, outreach grew and evolved. Filmmakers like George Stoney, Judith Helfand and Debra Chasnoff set standards for the filmmaker as organizer. They developed a creative process that involved listening to the concerns of grassroots organizations long before the first day of shooting and sharing rough cuts with target audiences. Along with ITVS, Outreach Extensions, The Television Race Initiative (later Active Voice) and Bill Moyer's Public Affairs Television led the way in developing models for successful collaboration with public television stations on a national scale. BUILDING THE NETWORK Over a short time, ITVS found strong support for its efforts, particularly in bigger cities—Boston, Chicago, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. In 1994, ITVS launched the Community Connections Project (CCP), placing local organizers in each of these locations (and later in Atlanta, Boise, Houston, San Francisco, Rapid City, Seattle and Washington, D.C.). ITVS was, and still remains, the only organization with regional outreach coordinators in key markets across the country. "With the CCP, our efforts could go deeper," O'Brien recalled.
In 1999, ITVS coordinated outreach around THE FARMER'S WIFE, David Sutherland's landmark six-hour documentary portrait of a Nebraska farm family on the verge of losing it all. THE FARMER'S WIFE was co-presented by Frontline. It received "common carriage," meaning that all PBS stations aired the film on the same day and at the same time, heightening the impact of a national outreach campaign. As ITVS began outreach around THE FARMER'S WIFE, staff heard from stations in the farm belt that they never received in-depth programming like this on issues of such importance to their audiences. ITVS hired two organizers based in Nebraska and built partnerships with prominent Midwest religious organizations including the Rural Church Network and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference.
By the end of the 90s, there was a surge of interest in this new dimension in filmmaking. In 1999, CPB announced support for a new National Center for Outreach (NCO), which supplanted PTOA and expanded resources and training for staff at PBS stations. That same year, Working Films formed to support multi-year campaigns with close grassroots ties. In 2000, Media Rights.org was created to help social issue documentaries and shorts find audiences among educators, librarians and nonprofits. OUTREACH = IMPACT Working through strategic partnerships both inside and outside public television has allowed ITVS to dramatically increase the reach and impact of its outreach projects. Now more than ever, the purpose of outreach goes beyond informing to actually motivating viewers to get involved in the issues presented. For THE NEW AMERICANS, a three-part series following four years in the lives of immigrants in the U.S., ITVS supported a strategic partnership of organizations including Active Voice, Outreach Extensions and the National Issues Forums Institute on a multi-year campaign. ITVS and its partners also built a national coalition of organizations to support the campaign and broaden the impact of the series through 132 organized events in 112 cities and rural communities.
While education and awareness-raising are always key among ITVS's campaign goals, some projects can go further, leading to concrete outcomes and significant positive change. SENTENCING THE VICTIM tells the story of the gang rape of victims' rights advocate Joanna Katz, and her subsequent frustration with a parole process that fails to consider the special needs of victims of violent crime. Katz co-produced SENTENCING THE VICTIM with filmmaker Liz Oakley. Her personal commitment to the issue, together with the work of ITVS and its national partners, brought victims' rights issues directly to viewers and police, parole officers, parole boards and prosecutors around the nation.
ITVS is currently in the throes of its most ambitious outreach project yet. In June 2006, the Emmy award-winning PBS series Independent Lens will present A LION IN THE HOUSE, a two-part special produced by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert. It documents the cancer journeys of five children and their families over six years. ITVS has convened an extraordinary group of partners, among them the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute.
Across the three focus areas, ITVS is working to build what it calls "cancer health collaboratives" in communities around the nation. "By bringing together leaders from key sectors in the local community, like pediatric oncology teams, social service providers, local government agencies and, of course, local public television stations, we hope communities can look at all the aspects of pediatric cancer care and better bridge the gaps in services to families battling this difficult illness," said Dennis Palmieri, ITVS's national outreach manager. In September 2005, ITVS's Community Connections Project underwent a complete reorganization. The result is a new national outreach program called ITVS Community. ITVS Community includes four programs that address different aspects of ITVS's community engagement mission: Community Cinema, Community Campaigns, Classroom and Community Network. ITVS Community Cinema is a monthly screening series in partnership with local public television stations. It screens nine films per year in each of 13 markets and looks to grow to 20 markets for the 2006–2007 season of the Independent Lens series, the mainstay of Community Cinema's programming. Screenings are hosted by local, regional and national partner organizations or city governments. Screenings are followed by a panel discussion, Q&A or special presentation. ITVS and partner organizations provide educational materials and opportunities to get involved for those who are moved by what they have learned. Thousands of audience members have been welcomed to venues like Los Angeles' Museum of Tolerance, where ITVS joined with Amnesty International in welcoming guest speaker Dr. Jose Ramos Horta, foreign minister of East Timor and winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, at a special screening of EN ROUTE TO BAGHDAD. ITVS Community Campaigns provides a program structure for longer-term projects, continuing the work of the CCP by focusing on a topic over the course of a full year or longer. In 2006, current campaigns include A LION IN THE HOUSE and the Frontline miniseries COUNTRY BOYS. ITVS is also providing grants to public television stations for local projects, developing larger community websites and spearheading national partner committees to drive campaign work and broaden ITVS Community's impact. "Starting in 2006, ITVS Community will launch Classroom, providing free lesson plans, curricular guides and activities along with a 10 to 15 minute classroom version of select Independent Lens shows," added Palmieri. "Classroom, alongside our new Community Network newsletter and communications system, will help us reach a larger and more diverse pool of organizations, schools and people through our outreach programs." As filmmakers and organizations continue to explore new ways for independent films to engage communities, the mission of ITVS remains constant. "From the beginning, ITVS has been committed to providing outreach that supports our diverse programming," said Jim Sommers, ITVS's director of broadcast and communications. "By listening to communities and working alongside our producers, station colleagues and partner organizations, we can continue to build a more informed, engaged society through public media." |
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